Did Grandpa pitch against Jim Thorpe?

I had a visit with Grandpa this morning, via newspapers.com. Though I now know the basic outlines of his life, each time I pick my research back up, I find some new item that fills in the gaps in my knowledge of his life.

My mother's father, Ralph Owens Hall, died in 1940. His wife had passed away 9 years earlier, so with the death of the father, Mom and her 3 siblings were orphaned. She and her brother Sam, still school age, were put on a train and sent up to live with an aunt in Philadelphia. They carried their basic clothing and a few small possessions that Depression-era children owned.  Not much family history made the trip north.  Needless to say, I never knew my grandfather, who died 15 years before I was born, other than through the recollections that my mother had of their limited time together.

When my daughter went off to college, she chose Dickinson College in Carlisle.  I had known that grandfather Ralph had attended Dickinson as well.  That was the extent of my knowledge about him.  But when my daughter went there, I befriended the archivist, and found that Dickinson had old yearbooks, college newspapers and other records from the time period when Ralph was there.  By then I was also much more active with genealogy and newspaper searches, and so the question of “Who was Ralph Owens Hall?” began to reveal itself to me. 

Dickinson has a tradition where the immense front doors to Old West, the oldest building on campus, are swung open twice a year:  once for the incoming freshman to walk through to sign a register, and once when the outgoing seniors walk out of the building to receive their diplomas.  I was there to see my daughter march in and out.  When first hearing of the tradition, I asked the archivist whether the register existed for September of 1902, when Ralph entered with the freshman class.  Yes indeed – it exists and so I was able to see his signature from that day.  Seeing my daughter’s experience, I could imagine the same thing happening in 1902.  Through the existing yearbooks, I was able to see photos of the handsome young man who enrolled in college at that time.

Why did Ralph choose Dickinson College?  He was a good athlete.  The athletic director at Dickinson, Forest Craver, offered to pay Ralph’s college expenses and board if he would play for Dickinson.  A college sports scholarship!  But this was offered in the days before sports scholarships existed.  The offer was made “under the table”.  Ralph accepted, and off he went to Dickinson College, where he was captain of the basketball team, a pitcher on the baseball team, Junior Class president, and involved with a variety of other clubs and activities.  He was a BMOC, and graduated in June of 1906 with a bachelors degree in philosophy.  His “major” is what I discovered this morning.

There was one wrinkle, though.  Craver did not make good on his promise to pay Ralph’s expenses.  So Ralph sued him.  And won.  He was awarded $217 in damages.  With the ensuing publicity, Craver resigned in disgrace.  But a few years later he was back at Dickinson, and served the college through a long career of teaching and coaching.  Dickinson was not the first college to offer payments to athletes, and Craver was doing what the others were doing.  But for whatever reason, Ralph was not paid what was promised, and this dirty laundry became public. 

Dickinson College is in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  At that time, there was a school right down the road, the Carlisle Indian School, that had some good athletes.  The two schools competed in certain sports together, including baseball.  A new student showed up at the Indian School in 1907, an all-around athlete named Jim Thorpe.  He excelled at every sport.  One account said that “Legend has it that Thorpe began his athletic career at Carlisle in 1907 when he walked past the track and beat the school's high jumpers with an impromptu 5'9" jump, still wearing plain clothes.”  Thorpe had a successful career in Carlisle, playing football, baseball, lacrosse, and track and field.  In the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe won both the pentathlon and decathlon events.  He went on to a career in pro football and baseball, and was named the Greatest Athlete of the 20th Century by various sources. 

There was a family story passed down that Grandfather Ralph had a tryout with the Washington Senators baseball team, and that he once pitched against Jim Thorpe.  That is my Holy Grail of family genealogy right now:  to find that box score and see what resulted.  I was so close one morning, in the bowels of the Dickinson College archives.  The weekly college newspaper reported on sports results, with box scores for baseball.  I found that the two teams played each other.  But Thorpe was not listed in the Carlisle lineup.  Ralph graduated in 1906.  I later found that Thorpe came to Carlisle in 1907.  They seem to have just missed each other.  So what about the family story? 

Ralph stayed in Carlisle the next year – he started law school at Dickinson.  He had coached baseball in his past, and so may have helped coach the Dickinson team of 1907.  My search led me to a baseball historian who was researching the Indian players from Carlisle.  He said a lot of these players would play semi-pro ball over the summers, and so Ralph may well have played against Thorpe in that setting.  Thorpe’s Olympic gold medals were taken away from him after his Olympic performance for that very reason, because he had been paid to play baseball before the Olympics. I am not certain that there were ever boxscores for these semi-pro games - young men simply competing for fun during the summers.  My Holy Grail remains out there, the question, "Did these two face each other?", unanswered.

At the time, the Olympic competition was limited to amateur athletes, and so even taking $5 to play baseball in a summer league was enough to disqualify an athlete from competing.  As late as 1980, recall that the U.S. Olympic hockey team that beat the Russian team was made up of all college players.  Not because they were the best players that the U.S. had to offer, but because they were still “amateurs”.  As were the Russian players– technically – because they were the Red Army team, paid by their country to serve in the Army – and assigned to work … as hockey players!  That distinction continued to erode in the 80’s and by 1992, the first Dream Team of professional basketball players competed in the Olympics.

The Olympic Committee righted the wrong it had done to Jim Thorpe by restoring his medals and his listing as the winner of the 1912 medals, in 1983, thirty years after his death.  In a curious coda to his life, at his death the small upstate Pennsylvania town of Mauch Chunk offered to change its name to Jim Thorpe, if the family would allow him to be buried in the town.  The deal was consummated.

Earlier this year, Barb and I spent a fun weekend in the town of Jim Thorpe, and visited his grave there.  In a memorial grove, there are statues of him, and a large crypt that contain his remains.  From time to time efforts are made to move his remains back to his home state of Oklahoma.  But so far, he remains here in Pennsylvania. 

Grandfather Ralph became a lawyer, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania law school and then being admitted to the bar in 1910.  He was a practicing lawyer for about 10 years, and then became a financial services entrepreneur, selling insurance, buying and selling mortgages, at one time he was a distributor of home heaters, and then he started a credit agency.  When the Great Depression hit, his businesses suffered.  A year later his wife died, leaving him a single father of 4 children in 1931.  

He soldiered on with his business for a number of years, and then one night at a family dinner in 1935, he proposed to move to Florida.  A family vote was taken – all were in favor, other than oldest son Ralph O. Hall Jr., who had graduated from college and was making a life of his own in suburban Philadelphia.   By 1936, Dad, three kids and a dog named Skippy were living in a trailer on Jacksonville Beach.  They later moved to a nice cottage on a lake in Orlando.  My mother remembered the life as idyllic.  She rode horses, they paddled in the lake, her brother and sister were ranked tennis players, and they generally took their meals at a local restaurant.  They survived on a monthly check that Ralph’s aunt sent them, and odd jobs that he picked up.

Mom recalled that her father “smoked like a chimney”.  He had been in a car crash in 1935 that crushed his chest, and so he always had breathing issues.  At times he would sleep upright, in a chair in the kitchen or even in the car.   On the morning of December 4, 1940, Mom remembered waking up, knowing it was a little past the regular time to get up for school, and thinking "Dad forgot to wake us.  Good, I'll get a little more sleep."  Dad and Sam slept in the front room of the house. Mom and her sister (then off at college) slept in a back bedroom.  Mom woke up a little later, sensing that something was wrong.  She poked her head in the boys' room, didn't see anything, and then went out to the kitchen and then the car to see if Dad was asleep in either place.  Not finding him there, she came back to the boy's bedroom and saw her father's body on the floor of the bedroom between the bed and the wall.  She had somehow not seen him there when she first checked.  He was 59 years old. 

Grandfather was cremated and shipped north for burial at the family plot of his hometown of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania. His 25-year-old son and namesake, Ralph O. Hall Jr., was given the task of taking the ashes up on the train and seeing to the burial. My mother had never been to her father’s grave and so in 2003, she and I made the pilgrimage to Beech Creek. We found the grave and the marker. Ralph’s parents and grandparents were there, as well as his two brothers. But no Ralph. There were likely no funds in the family till to pay for a marker in 1940, and so Grandfather’s name was never carved into the stone. But there is room on that stone, a local stone cutter has just assured me. Last week I ordered that the work be done. Hopefully in the summer of 2021 we can have a family gathering there, to see the name on the stone, and to remember the grandfather we never knew. And the circle will remain unbroken.